Okay, the good stuff first.
1) Pretty location, although we don't get to see very much of it. In an early scene, the two characters (the rest are just extras) go on a car tour of Barcelona, but except for the first stop, all we ever get to see is their blank faces inside the car. Talk is cheap; film is expensive.
2) Beautiful young women, several of them, but they are never given any significant dialogue, nor are they actually called upon to act. They walk on. They walk off. Occasionally one or another of them hops into the sack with one or the other cousin, pretty much interchangeably, and with no discernible passion or emotion. Not their fault, of course. It's the director, stupid, who evidently thinks of women the same way as did a lascivious architect I worked for in the 1960s -- as part of the decor.
And that was the good stuff.
This piece of work would have failed as the pilot for a sitcom. The whole thing is a running bicker between two snappish, immature, American preppie cousins. To borrow a line from Dorothy Parker, their performances "ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B." I knew (and loathed) guys like this in college, full of their vanity, their boarding school repartee, their shallow ignorance of the world, and their cool disdain for the people -- especially the women -- who tried to care about them. I suppose one should not blame the actors, since presumably they were delivering the performances the director asked for, while said director clearly was not busy offering guidance to any of the other performers. Yes, sadly, these two characters are somewhat realistic, but puerile poseurs are no fun to watch, either on or off the screen. 4/10
1) Pretty location, although we don't get to see very much of it. In an early scene, the two characters (the rest are just extras) go on a car tour of Barcelona, but except for the first stop, all we ever get to see is their blank faces inside the car. Talk is cheap; film is expensive.
2) Beautiful young women, several of them, but they are never given any significant dialogue, nor are they actually called upon to act. They walk on. They walk off. Occasionally one or another of them hops into the sack with one or the other cousin, pretty much interchangeably, and with no discernible passion or emotion. Not their fault, of course. It's the director, stupid, who evidently thinks of women the same way as did a lascivious architect I worked for in the 1960s -- as part of the decor.
And that was the good stuff.
This piece of work would have failed as the pilot for a sitcom. The whole thing is a running bicker between two snappish, immature, American preppie cousins. To borrow a line from Dorothy Parker, their performances "ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B." I knew (and loathed) guys like this in college, full of their vanity, their boarding school repartee, their shallow ignorance of the world, and their cool disdain for the people -- especially the women -- who tried to care about them. I suppose one should not blame the actors, since presumably they were delivering the performances the director asked for, while said director clearly was not busy offering guidance to any of the other performers. Yes, sadly, these two characters are somewhat realistic, but puerile poseurs are no fun to watch, either on or off the screen. 4/10